Cardinals break out the brooms

Monday

May 6, 2013 at 1:30 PM

The St. Louis Cardinals got out their brooms yesterday and instead of just sweeping the Milwaukee Brewers they demolished them as the Cardinals turned their brooms into bats and pounded out a 10 to 1 victory in their most dominating performance of the season.

Dennis Miller

The St. Louis Cardinals got out their brooms yesterday and instead of just sweeping the Milwaukee Brewers they demolished them as the Cardinals turned their brooms into bats and pounded out a 10 to 1 victory in their most dominating performance of the season. In fact, the offense was on high alert for all four games as they managed to survive a couple of rather interesting bullpen adventures to get their first four game sweep in I don’t know how long. Adam Wainright had a shaky start on Saturday but even that didn’t detour the offense as just about everybody contributed offensively. Another pleasant surprise was the performance of Carlos Martinez who was called up from Double A Springfield on Friday when the Cardinals sent Mitchell Boggs to Memphis to “find himself”. Martinez is an interesting story as he was someone who the Cardinals hoped to take a long look at this spring and was considered one of their top prospects. However, an issue with his work visa kept him from being able to enter this country until the last week or so of spring training. Since he was not able to have a normal spring training and the Cardinals were not able to adequately gauge his development they sent him to Double A Springfield. I was a little surprise they called him up this quickly without first promoting him to Triple A Memphis but they obviously knew what they were doing as he came in throwing strikes and hit 100 on the radar gun twice yesterday. It will be interesting to see how long the Cardinals keep this current bullpen alignment. It seems to have coincided with an offensive surge which will hopefully continue as the Cardinals start a quick two game series with The Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field on Tuesday. The Cubs have already found their way to last place and appear to be getting quite comfortable there but their games with the Cardinals are always interesting.

The Kansas City Royals also had a good weekend as they have taken the first two games of their three game series with the Chicago White Sox as they won in extra innings yesterday and won Saturday thanks to a dominating pitching performance by starting pitcher Jeremy Guthrie. Friday night’s game was rained out and is being made up this afternoon. The Royals have fallen a half game out of first place but that has more to do with the fact they have had so many rain outs than anything they are doing wrong.

The Truman State softball team saw their season come to an end on Saturday at the MIAA softball tournament. Truman lost to Missouri Western on Friday before coming back to defeat Pittsburg State in their first game on Saturday before losing to Emporia State in the double elimination tournament. Truman State finished the year with a 29 and 18 record.

It’s a beautiful day for a track meet and the NCMC track meet will take place out at the Kirksville High School track beginning at 3:00 p.m. today. We’ll have more on that in Wednesday’s blog but look for KHS athletes names to be near the top of the leader board in many of the events.

David Reagan won the Aarons 499 yesterday at Talladega. It’s a good thing they didn’t go that extra mile because it took them 7 and a half hours to go 499. There was a three and a half hour rain delay that kind of kept Carl Edwards from winning his first race of the year. Regan is a veteran NASCAR driver but isn’t someone with major sponsors and is part of the least funded team in NASCAR so it was nice to see him get the victory but I still would have rather seen Carl Edwards win.

ORB captured the Kentucky Derby on Saturday which I did manage to tune in for just as it was starting. The race coincided with a Cardinals bullpen implosion so it was nice to have a distraction. Orb now moves on the the Preakness as he tries to become the first horse in a number of years to win the Triple Crown. If he doesn’t win the Preakness I have no clue why they bother to run the third race. It seems rather pointless if there is no chance of a Triple Crown winner.

In a game full of missed opportunities the St. Louis Blues lost 1 to 0 on Saturday in their first round playoff series with the Los Angeles Kings. The Blues had plenty of chances as they were on power plays numerous times throughout the game but failed to convert any of those chances into goals. Game 4 of the series is tonight in Los Angeles. All the games have been very physical so far but the Blues simply must do a better job of converting power play opportunities into goals.

We’ll be back on Wednesday with more ramblings and complaints about the sports world. Thanks as always for reading and please check out all the other blogs on this site.